Getting Things Done<\/a> so he\u2019s got labels on everything. He\u2019s got labels on his file folders, his food, his pets, everything! He had one of these three hundred dollar labeling machines, a steam-propelled thing that produces beautiful ink jetted labels. I thought \u201cthat seems kind of nice,\u201d but since I was experimenting with labeling I didn\u2019t want to spend a lot of money. <\/p>\nI went to Amazon and I sorted them from cheapest to most expensive and it turns out the cheapest one was like fifteen dollars [It is now $9 on Amazon – MF]. It was one of those old school ones where you turn to the letter you want and clunk it out, then you turn to the next one, and clunk that out. It\u2019s got those black, red, or blue little plastic strips and you\u2019re pushing each letter into it. <\/p>\n
I looked at it and I thought \u201cthat\u2019s a fifteen dollar experiment . If I end up being lazy and not actually doing any labeling I won\u2019t waste too much money.\u201d So I ordered this thing and it has the advantage of not running on batteries or needing electricity and it turned out to be so delightful to use. <\/p>\n
I discovered it\u2019s actually useless as a labeler because if you make a mistake the label and the letters come out wonky and if you push harder they come out whiter and they\u2019re a little uneven. And I thought, \u201cwell this is actually a sub-par labeler, but it\u2019s fantastic for art projects!\u201d <\/p>\n
I started writing poems on it. One line of a poem was one strip and I would just tape them to things around my desk. This follows one of my dictums, which I\u2019ve discovered over and over again: bad tools make for great art! Tools that were designed to do something utilitarian and fail miserably at the task tend to produce delightful aesthetic experiences, and this is exactly why David Byrne discovered that PowerPoint and Excel were fabulous for creating artistic works. PowerPoint, as Edward Tufte proved, degrades cognition, but what degrades rational cognition can augment aesthetic cognition and you can do beautiful, crazy, stupid things with it. And, over and over again, when I find a tool and realize it\u2019s totally useless I go \u201cOk what can we do with it that\u2019s nuts?\u201d This is what this thing is. I\u2019ve realized this is not a label making thing because it fails at that. This is a publishing platform for producing the strangest looking type imaginable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fantastic for art projects<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27650"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27653,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27650\/revisions\/27653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}